Sex offender bill passes Senate

Legislation passed without fanfare in the Senate on Tuesday night would require convicted sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses and IM screen names with a government-controlled database — but only if Senate Democrats can overcome objections from Democrats in the House, and only if they’re willing to take the risk that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will get some of the credit for the law that would result.

The Senate version of the bill, known as the KIDS Act, is intended to make it difficult for sex offenders to join social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace. The act is just one of many Congress is considering as it takes aim at sex offenders.

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Beyond the KIDS Act, there’s the Deleting Online Predators Act, the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act, the Children's Listbroker Privacy Act, the Combating Child Exploitation Act and the Effective Child Pornography Prosecution Act.

And then there are the ones with the clever acronyms. The KIDS Act (Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act) is joined by the SAFE Act (Securing Adolescents From Exploitation Online Act) and the mother of them all, the PROTECT Our Children Act (Providing Resources, Officers and Technology to Eradicate Cyber Threats to Our Children Act).

How the KIDS Act fares will say much about the prognosis for the rest of Congress’ sex-offender agenda.

The bill was introduced by McCain and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and it passed by unanimous consent.

But civil libertarians say that the bill is too broad, that it could reach convicted offenders with little chance of recidivism and that it could prevent them from accessing not only MySpace, Facebook and other sites frequented by young people but also news sites and others built around social-networking models.

“Everybody wants to keep kids safe,” says Michael Macleod-Ball, the ACLU’s chief legislative and policy counsel. But Macleod-Ball said that the bill’s policy goals have to be balanced against the rights of individuals, and that each offender’s situation should be evaluated on its own merits.

“If you’re going to affect somebody’s rights, there’s got to be a connection to some sort of legitimate public policy purpose, and there are some people that are within the realm of the Senate regimen who would fall outside of that,” he said, arguing that it “makes a little more sense if there is a specific determination that’s made by the court or by some probationary or parole process that finds an actual nexus between the restriction you trying to impose and the nature of the conviction.”

Schumer downplays those concerns, saying that he hasn’t heard much opposition from the civil liberties community and that there are only “a couple people” in the House who oppose the registration requirement.

But among those are two House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), who head the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. Scott stripped the registration requirement out of the House version of the KIDS Act before it passed on a 417-0 vote in November, and Conyers said he supports Scott’s views.

“We’ll have to negotiate,” Conyers said of the Senate’s legislation.

Under the registration requirement approved by the Senate, social networking sites would have access to the government database of e-mail addresses and screen names and would be encouraged to ban those on it. It would be a violation of parole or probation to use different online identifiers.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children supports the bill, as does MySpace, Facebook, Microsoft and the American Family Association. One catch for Democrats: So, too, of course, does the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, who issued a press release Wednesday calling on the House to pass it as soon as possible.